Mistakes People Make In Their Resumes

In my last post, I discussed a very important topic. In this article, I will explain the biggest mistakes people make in their resumes.

In today’s market, the job sector is completely saturated. There are some places like Google, LinkedIn, Uber and more, that get upwards to 50,000 resumes per week. That’s an insane amount of resumes! I have hired for numerous positions during the past few years of my career, and let me tell you – there are some super simple mistakes that people make. The worst part of the whole thing is that these mistakes can be easily rectified if the person just proofread a little more carefully.

Here are some of the biggest mistakes people make when creating and sending in their resumes:

Mistake #1 – People Who Make Typos

I see this all the time. There was a study done at a popular university in which it stated that over 60% of all resumes, globally, had typos in them. This is an insanely high number. Imagine reading a resume and seeing the word “their” beyond used, when in reality it should have said “they’re” for they are. I reviewed a resume sent in by Jarryd Fillmore once, and it was spot on. No typos at all! Typos are by far something that can easily be prevented by simply proofreading a lot more carefully.

Mistake #2 – People Who’s Resumes Are Too Long

I remember when I was younger and obviously uneducated, I did not understand resume length. To be honest, I wanted to make sure that I highlighted absolutely everything that I know. I thought content was king, therefore I loaded it up. This is a terrible idea! Recruiters and people that work in human resources absolutely do not have the time to sit down and read over 10 resumes. It’s been shown that the average recruiter spends about 6 seconds skimming over a resume, which is an extremely short amount of time. The rule of thumb in this day and age is to keep your resume to under one page. If you have over ten years of experience,then by all means fit two on there. But ultimately you want to give the recruiter the ability to skim over your resume. Jarryd Fillmore has made sure to go over his resume multiple times, and simply highlighting his achievements rather than putting absolutely everything he can on his resume.

Mistake #3 – Formatting

Jarryd Fillmore has seen so many errors over the years in regards to resume formatting it is not even funny. A simple resume with two columns will work for virtually any job. The reason why formatting is extremely important when it comes to resumes is because it allows people (not only recruiters, but their co-workers and superiors) to easily read over the resume. Imagine if you’re reading a newspaper, and the background is white. Now imagine the text being an extremely faint gray colour – how hard is that to read? That’s extremely difficult to read. So that point is, making it really easy for people to read and navigate is extremely important for any resume.

Mistake #4 – Lying On You Resume

Lying on your resume is a massive no-no. Now there are certain things you can lie about, for example extending your work for a month or two at a certain place. But if you say that you’re super awesome at designing and coding websites in two hundred different languages when you absolutely cannot, that’s a terrible idea. Why is that a bad idea? Well, lets say you actually get hired. Your first task is to build a one-page web app using Angular 2. You need to not only know the framework, but also know JavaScript inside and out. Turns out you don’t know any of that. Guess what? You’re fired! It’s a terrible idea to lie on a resume, so I would advise strongly that you just simply do not do it.

Mistake #5 – Making It Artistic

I see a ton of resumes around, especially in the design world, where they use things like infographics to explain how good or bad they are at something. First of all, those graphs are totally biased. There’s absolutely no way that you can tell how good or bad you subjectively are at something. Number two, it’s just plain stupid. So don’t do it. It looks really bad.